Because after our holiday in May, we thought that Ardbol Globo S.L. existed, we tried to figure out how to open a bank account online. Since we did the deposit at Santander, we tried there first.
It looked all very promising; they had a page on their website for opening a business account online. The first thing that was wrong was that I wasn't able to choose a location where we wanted to do the banking (Miranda de Ebro). Which is surprising for us in itself that you are dependent on a location. Luckily, they have a helpdesk where you can ask for an English-speaking person. After a few days, they solved this bug. Then I had to upload some documents, the most important one being the escritura (the registration document of Ardbol), which I didn't have. So I asked the Notary, who was on holiday, then I asked the gestor, who didn't react. When the notary returned, she sent us the document we set up when we were there. I uploaded that and could continue, but then I got to the point where I couldn't verify myself. There were several options, and I asked the helpdesk which option I could use, and they said there should be an option with a video. I never saw that option, even after several calls with the helpdesk.
Then Tibor tried another bank, there it turned out that we needed a digital certificate, which was not clear how or where to get that.
So the first day we were in Spain on our summer holiday, we went to the bank. There they said, "You need these three documents." We didn't have those documents because we were not registered, which we didn't know at that time. They said, "Go to the gestor," so we went to the one we went to before, a couple of streets away. But they could not help us either.
After visiting our notary and knowing what was the problem, we told the bank we will have the documents in a couple of day's and asked: "If we send you those three documents, do we have to visit an office or can we do it online?" They kept answering, "Just send us the three documents." So when we were registered, we sent them the documents and asked if they could open the account. They said yes, we can open the account, and we asked again if we had to come to an office, but they didn't answer.
We expected that we would need to sign some documents and we hoped it would be possible to do it before hand, but as we did not get a clear answer we could only hope for the best. We already had signed documents when doing the deposit so hopefully we could to it from Amsterdam.So, in the end, we left Spain without a bank account. We even tried an other bank while we had all documents but for that we needed an appointment which we did not have time for anymore.
On Monday back home, we emailed them again and got an out-of-office reply. What? So we asked our friend Luuk to call them. Luckily, the first time we went to the Santander office, Tibor took a photo of the business card of a lady who helped us and spoke English (but wasn't from the business department).
Luuk called her, and we emailed her, and she helped us very well. She asked for the three documents, which weren't in a system yet, I guess, so we sent them again. She said we needed a definite NIF number, but that could come later. We didn't know what "later" meant: later, before the opening of the account, or after opening the account. We didn't get a clear answer on that.
Also, we said we needed the bank account and the possibility on Thursday, the 31st. Can we come at nine that day (because finally we figured out that we had to come to the office to open the account)? We also didn't get a clear answer on that. But we didn't get a "no," so we assumed the best and stepped on the train.
On August 31st, we were at the bank at nine o'clock and saw that the lady already had papers on her desk about Ardbol Globo S.L. And yes, those were the papers for opening the bank account, with a bank account number on it. Tibor immediately tried to transfer 1 euro to the account. And a funny detail, we had to sign digitally. After the signing, we got all the login details for viewing the account and making transactions!
As we did not know if the account would work the same day we waited until the 1 euro would arrive. Which was quite stressful. Because we had to do the payment of the house and land the next day. If the money would be stuck somewhere between accounts we would have a problem. Possibly losing our down payment of 10%.
So in the bar we waited until the 1 euro would arrive. And although in my Triodos account it was marked as sent it did not arrive. Than Maaike tried from her Rabobank and that was there within 1 minute! Happy as we could be with the arrival of 1 euro we decided to sent over the rest of the amounts.
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